


to drive life into a corner

by purrfectj



Series: resign yourself to the influence of the earth [7]
Category: Stardew Valley (Video Game), Walden - Henry David Thoreau
Genre: F/M, Poetry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-15
Updated: 2016-05-15
Packaged: 2018-06-08 14:12:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,434
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6858214
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/purrfectj/pseuds/purrfectj
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tess dreams of Harvey and courts Alex. She is attracted to lost, broken people. If she is broken, and her lover is broken, can they be a whole?</p>
<p>This is part 7 of a many-part series exploring Stardew Valley, its inhabitants, and its newest addition, a female farmer named Tess. It's written in present tense and is rooted in my love for the farm where I grew up and my lifelong love affair with Henry David Thoreau's Walden: Or, Life in the Woods.</p>
            </blockquote>





	to drive life into a corner

**Author's Note:**

> The poem Tess is thinking of here is [_Home Burial_](https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/home-burial) by Robert Frost. It is a painful poem and could be triggering. Please be careful.

The chores are never ending if she wants to make a profit. The couple of rusty old sprinklers she found in the shed, the kind that spin in lazy circles making rainbows, don’t even reach half of what she’s planted and the big, greenish-grey metal watering can with its elegant long spout and half-rusted handle is fucking heavy when she totes it around. She’s reading farming magazines in her spare time, learning about crop rotation and proper fertilization and how to build irrigation ditches when before she would have been buried in love’s labor lost or the latest, greatest pick from goodreads, but for now she’s lugging around the stupid can so she can sprinkle water on the strawberries and turnips and green beans and cauliflower and kale and potatoes, on the surprisingly soldier straight rows of bright, cheerful tulips along the front porch, and on the plot of blue jazz she meant to design as a sort of butterfly garden but got distracted halfway through by the nail she managed to drive into the meaty flesh under her thumb rather than into the fencepost. 

Dr. Harvey is probably paying for a luxury vacation with all of the money she funnels his way; the nail that is rusty and has every possibility of giving her tetanus, a shot she hasn’t had since she went to college. Of course he’s kind about it, remembers every time she slinks into his clinic blushing and nervous and embarrassed and angry because she’s blushing and nervous and embarrassed that she is a terrible patient who faints at the sight of a needle. It’s likely hard to forget the tattered, ragged woman who touches him without permission before passing out in his lap or somehow insulting him for giving her a ride home. 

Dr. Harvey is a man who needs you to ask him permission. 

She thinks about him a lot, more than she probably should, more than she thought she would when she is buying Alex’s affection with a twice-weekly egg delivery, his sapphire blue eyes lighting up every time he sees her but she does not think of Alex at night in her narrow, small bed, no, it is not Alex’s muscles or smirk but Dr. Harvey’s kind, patient hands on her skin, slippery fine hair under her fingers, seductive rasp of sharp, prickly whiskers, as pleasure washes in and out and over her, slow and easy as the evening tide. 

She avoids him in town, avoids him as she avoids most everyone save Emily and Alex and the inevitable Pierre, but still there have been the couple of times she’s seen him in Pierre’s, Pierre grinning as they haggle fiercely over some seeds or fertilizer she wants, Dr. Harvey’s eyes on the back of her neck, burning bright, goosebumps breaking out over her body, ants marching across her nerves. And the day she nearly bowls him over near the waterfront, her fishing pole and her day’s catch on its stringer slung over her shoulder, wet slapping obscene sound on her almost bare legs, peeling sunburn marking her cheeks and forehead and the bridge of her nose with streaks of white, his hands stuffed in the front pockets of his baggy chinos until they aren’t, until they’re curling around her biceps to steady her and she thinks he’s going to kiss her, his mustache twitching under his so serious forest eyes, deep and dark, and she inhales sharply, her thighs trembling. 

But he doesn’t. He sets her gently on her feet, makes sure she’s stable, and before she can say so much as “Hello” or “Thanks” or “Don’t go”, he’s walking away from her, back stiff and straight. 

She leaves a pint of strawberries for him with Maru, his nurse who is also Robin’s daughter, gorgeous skin in a shade somewhere between dusk and dawn and intelligent, snapping black eyes. Maru frowns down at the red berries, her generous mouth pursed, and just shakes her head. “I’ll make sure he gets them.” 

Tess is halfway out the door of the thankfully, blissfully bare clinic when Maru calls out, snap sharp and jagged, “He likes pickles.” 

Alex, she’s sure, would make a snappy comeback about a sour disposition and in fact does when Tess tells him the story later in the week over slightly scorched and runny eggs that Alex has cooked himself on this raining, miserable late spring morning, his grandparents already out for the day, pretty faded Evelyn who has been a fount of information about flowers, happy to chatter away to Tess over tea and cookies about gardens and soil and sour, depressed George who tells her she looks like her grandmother and that her grandfather was a swindler who knew how to horsetrade with an expression that says clearly Tess did not inherit that particular skill. 

Alex doesn’t have much to say after his sly comment about Dr. Harvey, picking over his eggs with listless movements of his chopsticks. If she were a better friend, a better person, she would ask him what’s wrong but other people’s problems are always a sticky morass for Tess: she feels too much too soon and will, can, does sink slowly into the bog, flailing uselessly until someone with more sense and less sympathy or empathy comes along and saves them both. 

Broken people have always called to her, the siren’s song of _t_ _ell me about it if it’s something human,_ _let me into your grief._ Oh, Robert Frost, but if they let you in, they expect you to forgive because to forgive is divine, and Tess is not good at forgiveness, not good at the glass filling back up to the top, brimful of possibilities, no, Tess likes a glass that is cracked and leaking, spilling regret onto the carpet. 

Dr. Harvey knows this about her, duct tape as bandages, nails under skin, blood smeared on his pristine white coat, something like disapproval in his eyes when he sees her coming out of Alex’s house after breakfast. She stands in the driving, chilly rain and smiles at him, a corner of her mouth quirking in a self-deprecating half-grin, her hand lifting to wave, the curl of her fingers almost a come-hither motion. To her shock, delight, horror, anticipation, he obeys, meeting her halfway between Alex’s house and Pierre’s, somewhere behind the saloon but far enough away from the dumpster that the smell is downwind. 

Peering up at him from under the tangle of her soaked eyelashes and dripping hair, she reaches out and counts the buttons on his bottle fly green jacket, one, two, three, four, hovering somewhere around the slim line of his hips when his fingers, those fingers she’s dreamed of dipping between her thighs, long and nimble and deep, wrap around her wrist, loosely but with intent, and the breath catches sharply behind Tess’s bellybutton, roll, pitch, dive. 

“Tess.” His voice is careful and slow, a man soothing a wild animal, and she watches as blood rushes to the surface of his skin, painting the hollows of his cheeks and the bridge of his nose cherry red. “Tess,” he says, again, only her name, and then he sighs and lets her go, releasing her and stepping back. He does not stuff his hands in his pockets but instead leaves them between them, almost but not quite touching hers, almost but not quite close enough to tangle their fingers together, almost but not quite enough but maybe a little bit, maybe almost there. His eyes roam her face as she remains perfectly still. 

_She let him look, sure that he wouldn’t see, blind creature; and awhile he didn’t see._

Steam rises between them, two damp bodies yearning toward each other, toward safety and comfort and light. Toward what’s missing and torn and bloodied in the pounding, wet rain, slick skin, panting breaths, missed opportunities. Tess does not move forward and she does not let her gaze waver from his and she does not ask permission as she spreads her hand, palm open, fingers splayed, over his left pectoral muscle. 

_But at last he murmured, ‘Oh,' and again, ‘Oh.'_

It is not that she runs from him. 

She runs from herself. 

This is the day Tess straps a sword, slightly bent and wavering but sharp for all of that, to her belt and plunges into the dark of the mines. 

_There’s something I should like to ask you, dear._

_You don’t know how to ask it._

Lying in her bed, her own fingers the wrong size, shape, texture, length, ability, Tess whispers, “Help me, then.” 


End file.
